Transportation Engineering Instructional Practices

Abstract

Instructional practices in transportation engineering education are evolving, and only some of these changes have been documented in the literature. This paper provides a systematic review of journal articles and refereed conference papers that address innovations in transportation engineering education; the focus is on novel instructional practices and their influence on student learning. The literature review finds 46 articles for analysis, with an increasing frequency of those publications over time. Instructional practices described in these papers include simulation, visualization, problem-based learning, and other active-learning techniques. Most of these articles were written by individual researchers or a team of researchers at a single institution, and few of the articles cite one another; this finding suggests a need for more effective dissemination. Techniques for measuring student learning include in-person interviews, a variety of survey types (typically multiple choice or open-ended), concept maps, and direct assessment of student work. These techniques are implemented mostly as postassessments, but in some work, a pre- and postcourse experimental design is employed. It is clear that more rigorous evaluation of student learning, resulting from changes in teaching practices, should be considered. This analytical review of the literature provides a resource for transportation engineering educators to identify pedagogical practices that are relevant to their courses and suggestions for how to measure the effect of these techniques on student learning.

Implementation of active learning method in transportation engineering seminar course: Case study at San Diego State University

“…Besides the development of curricula as a critical aspect for the development of competencies of future TE professionals [12], there have been a series of efforts in developing educational practices. A recent comprehensive review of advances of TE teaching practices classifies them into simulation, visualization, experience-and problem-based learning, and other active learning techniques [14]. Moreover, this review concluded that there is a need to further improve the assessment practices for evaluating changes in teaching practices and student learning [14].…”

What a Systematic Literature Review Tells Us About Transportation Engineering Education

“…Hurwitz et al 3 describes in detail the literature reviewed in response to the research questions related to instructional practices and measurement of student learning. Forty-six papers met the inclusion criteria for these research questions.…”

“…The following sections summarize the methodology provided in Borrego et al and use the recently completed systematic literature review in transportation engineering as a case study to show how the methodology can be applied 1,3 .…”

“…Use of citations can be helpful when literature addressing the research question is scarce. The process described above resulted in the archive list shown in Table 1 for the transportation engineering education case study 3 . Page 26.1717.4 …”

“…For this paper, transportation engineering is used as a case study to illustrate the methodology proposed by Borrego et al and to provide examples of the types of insight that a systematic literature review can provide. The complete results of the systematic literature review can be found in a separate paper 3 . This paper describes the process of performing a systematic literature review, summarizes the results of the review in transportation engineering education, and discusses how other disciplines could benefit from such an approach.…”